'State of the Schools': Superintendent has plans to reform Lorain's district

LORAIN -- After six months on the job, Lorain City Schools Superintendent Tom Tucker has put the beginning of his plans to reform the district in to motion.

Tucker will publicly present his "State of the Schools" address at a special board meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Charleston Administrative building. The address will outline issues facing the district in the near future as well as the fixes the administration has planned.

Tucker has a tough job ahead of him after returning to the district as it landed in "Academic Emergency," the lowest possible academic ranking it could receive from the Ohio Department of Education.

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Since starting in August, Tucker and his staff have been meeting with other school districts to find "best practices," approaches that have proved successful in similar districts, such as Elyria. Tucker also hired former Palm Elementary principal and ODE school turn-around specialist Pamela Szegedy as his "assistant superintendent of school improvement through teaching and learning" to help with the repair work.

The Short Term:

Tucker's first line of fixes, which he said are short term because of upcoming changes to state curriculum, increased school days voluntarily by an hour to allow tutoring and educational programs to tailor learning to individual students rather than entire classrooms.

The tutoring focuses on math and reading in the grades that are tested by the Ohio Achievement Assessments and the Ohio Graduation Test - third grade through eighth grade and 10th grade, respectively.

The response has been overwhelming, as 53 percent of students in grades three to eight are participating in the tutoring, Tucker said. The students are provided transportation home afterward, he said.

Those tests heavily influence scoring on state report cards, as low scores in the OAA were largely behind the district's dwindled ranking in school year 2011-2012. Extra attention to those grade levels could bring the district's overall score up.

The other side of the short term fix is a refocusing on the educational standards set by the state.

The OAA grade levels will also get targeted lessons from teachers with two 45 minute blocks focused on reading and math skill building. These skill building blocks were added by "tightening" the student's scheduling, said Szegedy. Students now spend more time "on-task" than previously and still have separate reading, math, science and social studies classes in their 375 minute school days.

The skill building blocks teach the standards set by the state for reading and math testing. Students will focus on one element for a week or two and then immediately be tested on it.

This allows teachers to see the data of what is working and adjust accordingly.

Students who did not learn the material effectively will be placed in intervention classes, which will be run by soon-to-be-hired "Title 1" grant teachers. Instead of moving the entire class forward and hoping the students who fell behind can catch up, the intervention classes will allow those students to get help with the material they struggle with.

After covering the four areas of reading and math in each block, the students will have a final week to take practice tests and to prepare for the OAA.

"Teachers are going to be responsible for their students," Szegedy said. In the past, if a majority of students learned the material, the teacher was considered to have done his or her job.

"In the classrooms of old, it would have been 'well, it's their problem,'" Szegedy said.

The same accountability will stretch to the high school with student "teaming" for students in grades seven through 10.

Teachers will be given a certain amount of students to guide.

The academic mentoring will allow teachers to see where students are struggling and where they are excelling and then help them develop goals for the future. "Teaming" also gives parents a point of contact who will know the student's full progress, rather than individual teachers who may only know how well a student is doing in an individual class.

The short term fixes will potentially address the district's academic ranking, which could trigger the creation of a state-run academic distress committee if the district remains in "academic emergency" for three years, Tucker said. The district only has to come out of the ranking to stop the process, he said.

The Long Term:

Lorain City Schools faces a number issues in the future. New state mandates will create new learning standards for all grades and require increased accountability for reading scores in elementary schools.

The Common Core, the state's new standard, will create more rigorous standardized tests to replace the OAA and the OGT. Those tests will go live in 2014-2015 after two years in pilot testing. The testing will completely use computers that require new forms of questions rather than multiple choice, Tucker said. Students must begin to learn how to use those systems properly, he said.

At the same time, House Bill 555 will overhaul the state's report card system and replace it with a A-F scale. The ranking system will have new standards and will, for example, take in to account when a high school student has to take a remedial class in college, Tucker said.

The state will also roll out its "Third Grade Reading Guarantee," an unfunded mandate that will require diagnostic tests every year starting in kindergarten. Those tests will ensure that students are at the proper reading level by the third grade.

The district will start preparing students for the state changes soon, but the district's primary long term goals start at the beginning.

Roughly, only 17 percent of Lorain City Schools' students are kindergarten ready, Tucker said.

"What some students learn when they 3 and 4, we have to teach them when they are 5, 6," he said. Students who start out behind often stay behind as the schools have to teach more than a year's worth of material.

"It all starts in kindergarten," he said. "The more you do in those early years to set that focus, the less remedial work you have to do down the road."

Tucker fought hard to restore full-day kindergarten because of the great importance of early childhood education. It returned at the end of January, along with high school busing.

Tucker said he will be reaching out to organizations that handle preschool in the area to see if Lorain City Schools can share services or provide help. The district could receive more than $1 million dollars in extra state funding for early childhood education if Gov. Kasich's proposed "Achievement Everywhere" passes unaltered through the state legislature. Tucker said the proposal could provide more than $6 million in additional state funding in fiscal year 2014, but that the district is not planning around the money until it is official.

Tucker's plan for the future includes putting a stop to the constant reshuffling of students, which he said has caused confusion and a loss of a connection to school building and its staff by the students.

"People want to know what school they are going to attend, they want to know who their teacher is going to be, who their principal is going to be," he said. The district redistricted last year and in some cases students do not attend the same buildings as their siblings, he said.

The district will also review its grant funding to receive grants that are not only sustainable, but that support the overall academic mission of the district, Tucker said.

More administrative cuts are coming, Tucker said. The current staff has been receiving professional development so that redundancy in the district can be reduced.

"We need to make sure we are doing it effectively, with the least amount of people necessary," he said.

Tucker and Szegedy said the administrative staff should be serving the teachers, so that the teachers can better serve the students.

To better engage the community, a new website with an alert system and two new committees will be developed. The website is expected to debut soon with easier navigation and access to each day's events. The alert system will allow parents and staff to receive text message and emails from the district later this summer, Tucker said. Along with the new website, the district is working on a technology upgrade plan so that outdated equipment, such as the server from 2003 that runs the website, can be phased out and replaced in a timely manner.

Community feedback is important to Tucker and the strategic planning committee, which will develop the district's goals for the future, will be made up primarily by the public. Only a third of the committee will be from the district, he said. The recently restored business advisory committee will allow the district to interact with local business leaders.

"I'll take anything that works, there are a lot of good ideas and good programs out there," he said.

The fixes to the district will be an uphill battle, but both Tucker and Szegedy have said they are in for the long haul.

"We have good kids -- very good kids, but we have to do better at meeting their individual needs," Szegedy said. "We're starting at the ground floor and we are going to do it right."